Nortel Networks Filed for Bankruptcy Protection

By Sun

When I first learned that Nortel Networks (NT) has sought bankruptcy protection this morning via @MarketWatch on Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter), I wasn’t really surprised (OK, a little bit). Wasn’t it just a month ago when reports came out that the company was seeking legal advices for a possible filing? Though NT later denied such an activity, I suspect the speculation ever went away. After all, the company has been in a terrible shape since the dot com and telecom collapse early this decade. Though the company has tried desperately almost everything to make a comeback, it has never returned to what it was 9 years ago and the stock kept trading lower and lower amid management scandal and slumping sales.

I had a bitter history with NT, not with the company itself, but with its stocks. After graduation, I worked for NT’s main competitor, Lucent, briefly, and after seeing LU and NT dropped into the penny stock category in 2002, I started to buy those stocks. In fact NT was the very first stock I ever bought. In more than five years, I repeatedly bought and sold the stock and I did make a few bucks in the early days. Unfortunately, all the money I made early were lost later as I naively hoped the company could be turned around. I eventually gave up and unloaded all my NT shares last year, taking a deep loss.

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